Concatenating to Clipboard?

Question

Does anyone know of a utility (for Windows or Linux or MacOSX) that will append the selected contents to the clipboard? Rather than killing what's already there...(maybe using a different keyboard shortcut instead of Ctrl+C to do this?

And I don't mean multiple-clipboard items...

I mean concatenating multiple strings of text to the same clip that resides on the clipboard.

Subminiature

Thanks for the - quite late ;-) - clarification on "I don't mean multiple-clipboard items" – Micropathology

Answer 1

I found one! Lifehacker has featured it, although abet it being only for Windows here it is:

Clipchain

Subminiature

How about Linux. Maybe someone know alternatives? – Oocyte

Firefox addon AddMoreTextToClipboard is cross-platform and does this in Firefox, but I don't know of anything more general. – Sirajuddaula

Answer 2

There are a bunch of utilities that will keep a buffer/queue of the most recently clipped items.

To do the specific function you mention (append to existing item), it would seem fairly trivial to write an app to get the clipboard, save what's there, append the new stuff, then transfer the combined contents back to the clipboard.

A big caveat/gotcha... this would work fairly simply for text, but what about other formats? If there's an image on the clipboard, how would you handle appending text? Or vice versa?

Accompany

Yeah that's true...kudos for figuring out what I meant! I refined my question though. – Subminiature

Writing that would be a native-windows app wouldn't it? – Subminiature

It would be a native app on the platform. You mentioned Windows, it would be pretty easy with .NET - the clipboard interfaces are in System.Windows.Clipboard – Accompany

Oh sweet! Maybe I'll have to try that...I even thought of a cool feature for when you're copying images...a dialog pops up (with keyboard controls of course) and asks the user where they want to append the image to on the text. (or we have a different keyboard shortcut for each placement) – Subminiature

Answer 3

LaunchBar has this functionality, and I use it extensively.

To be honest, I don't use it for pictures, so I don't know how they handle it, but it handles text beautifully.

And the launch key is a double CMD/C (that's hold command and press C twice). Which is intuitive, because it is the same key combination. And next time you just do a normal CMD/C (once) for a normal copy, then we start again.

And what's more, there's clipboard history, so if you forget to double C, you haven't lost anything. And even more… I believe the shortcut access and paste options for the clipboard history is the best I have come across (and I have tried many utilities).

And, (finally), you get the benefits of LaunchBar's main asset as a launcher, which I've become so used to it, I can't live without it.

Bonesetter

Answer 4

No, but it would be relatively easy to write one in C# (or lots of other languages too):

1. Create an app that hides to the "system tray"
2. It creates a keyboard hook
3. When the appropriate key-combo is pressed, if the Clipboard format is text, get the current text, concatenate the selected text (getting the selected text would be the hard part), and puts it back into the Clipboard.

Axum

@consultutah I'm going to get a C# book in the mail in a few days, I'm going to have to give this a try. – Subminiature

Keyboard hook is the wrong way to go. A properly-implemented clipboard viewer is what you want. – Bekki

Answer 5

on Windows 10, there is a "save multiple clipboard items" setting to enable multiple clipboard items to be stored. With WinLogo-V you can then view and paste them in any sequence.

Caterinacatering

Answer 6

On Windows 7 and 8 the key combo Ctrl-Shift-C appends to the existing clipboard.

Cheers!

Bey

Answer 7

The Autohotkey script appends to the clipboard when Ctrl-Insert is pressed.

^Insert::  ; Add to clipboard
bak = %clipboard%
Clip()
clipboard = %bak%`r`n%clipboard%
return

Maynor

Not works for me.. Just copy paste to ahk file and run. AutoHotKey says that line 3 'Clip()' calls to nonexistence function. – Edithe

Answer 8

This isn't quite what you wanted, but here goes:

Microsoft Word has a tool called Spike that concatenates multiple selections (text, tables, and images) and then pastes them. To use it, select something, then press Ctrl + F3 to cut it, and append it to the Spike (you can use Ctrl + z to undo the cut).

Press Ctrl + Shift + F3 to paste the contents of the Spike and clear the Spike, or type "spike↵" to paste without clearing the spike.

Dogs

Answer 9

I'm not sure if this is helpful at all, but emacs keeps its own kill-ring, so you can scroll back, or even search through things that you've cut or copied...

Supercool